The Virginian

Friday, January 30, 2015

I need a hashtag

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Are women without genitalia the result of Republican budget cuts or the Koch brothers?

This is not a hoax.

It appears that Mount Holyoke College - in impeccably Liberal Massachusetts - cancelled a planned performance of “The Vagina Monologues” because the women's college deemed the play “exclusionary” toward the “transgendered community,” possibly offending women without vaginas.

There are any number of reasons not to stage one of the most over-rated pieces of sexual propaganda foisted on the public in the name of "art." But we are inured to the absurdities of the "art" world since reading Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word," seeing Piss Christ exhibited as art - along with a urinal - and the excretable framed crap collected by Paine Webber's chairman Don Marron.

So it appears that feminism has now progressed to a point that it's now removing it's founders, much as Stalin removed the founding Communists. Eve Ensler? Never heard of her.

Nikolai Yezhov, walking with Stalin in the left photo from the 1930s, was killed in 1940.Following his execution, Yezhov was edited out of the photo by Soviet censors/

A mere few weeks ago "The Vagina Monologues" was the high point of feminist art. Today, it's relegated to the dustbin of history, an example of the exclusionary nature of the less enlightened strains of feminism, oppressing women without vaginas. Next we can expect an investigation to see if the Koch brothers, in league with perfidious Republicans are responsible for this outrage.

Friday, January 23, 2015

A Tedious, Recycled State of the Union

Before the financial crisis, Obama ran on “investing” in education, health care, renewable energy, infrastructure, and so on. After the financial crisis hit, presumably our needs changed, but not Obama’s agenda. Suddenly, what America needed to do to respond to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was to again “invest” in education, health care, renewable energy, and infrastructure. And now that the “shadow of crisis has passed,” as he announced on Tuesday, the same investments are needed. Why? Because he said it before, of course.

The same holds true with his foreign-policy agenda. As a candidate, Obama vowed that we needed to pull back from the War on Terror. After the rise of the Islamic State and the metastasizing of jihadist terror around the world, we must stay the course. Even when events deviate from the president’s well-worn script, what matters is that the script never change so Obama can keep talking and talking and talking.

"This isn't ISIS"

Tom Brady hit the right note. As the press obsesses over the correct air pressure in a football, ignoring Obama's obvious lies in his just completed - and little watched - State of the Union address.

So little attention has been paid to ISIS lately that President Barack Obama was able to boast in his State of the Union address that an American-led coalition has stopped the terror gang’s advances without drawing a derisive laugh from his audience. That claim is not corroborated by any press reports we’ve been able to hunt down, and will surely come as a surprise to the unfortunate residents of Mosul and Fallujah and numerous other cities that once enjoyed the protection of American troops but are now beleaguered by ISIS’ murderous gangs, and is acknowledged as a falsehood by Pentagon officials, but that’s easily overlooked when there’s a charge afoot that a professional football team might have deflated a ball. The president further claimed that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has been halted, that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program in gratitude for the president’s protection from economic sanctions, and that he somehow deserves credit for America’s recent oil boom, but until some photogenic sports star draws attention to such balderdash it will also go largely unnoticed.

When there are serious issues - like the proper amount of air pumped into a football - the press knows its priorities. It is on it like white on rice, grateful for being able to ignore the increasingly desperate plight of the middle class and the spread of a deadly virus known as radical Islam.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Nothing to Do with Islam. Move Along.

Charlie Hebdo and the aftermath.

What should we say about the Muslim terror attacks in Paris and Charlie Hebdo? Having waited a decent interval for the dead to be buried and the marchers to go home, for the hot outrage to have cooled, let's have a discussion.

What made Charlie a target? It dared make fun of Mohammad. That is not allowed by Muslims.

Few people were aware of this magazine before the assault by Muslim terrorists. It's circulation is modest and it's treatment of its subject matter is tasteless. Charlie is a virulently anti-religious magazine but it has the distinction of including Islam as a target. Most other Western publications use a deferential tone when discussing Islam, referring the Mohammad as "The Prophet" and endlessly referring to Islam as the "Religion of Peace." These same publications are uninhibited in their discussion of Christianity, and evangelical Christianity is mocked mercilessly. The press does not refer to Christ as Messiah Jesus. Unlike the Koran, the Bible is often referred to, not as Christianity's "Holy Book" but as the object of "Bible Thumpers."

You can be absolutely sure that every Christmas or Easter a newspaper or magazine near you will have an article by a "modern" biblical scholar deconstructing scripture, or one about "finding" Jesus' tomb with the bones still inside. The Virgin Mary comes in for special treatment; the BBC aired a program claiming that Jesus' real father was a Roman soldier who raped Mary.

In a country that is roughly three-quarters Christian, the media feel free to attack Christianity and disparage Christians. In fact it's admired for its anti-clericalism in the social circles these people inhabit. But they show respect for Muslims sensibilities because they're cowards. They know that Muslims will kill you, Methodists don't.

Which brings us to Charlie. With the exception of the Muslim world, there is universal agreement that the terrorist attack by Islamofascists on Charlie is despicable. But militant Islamists have been killing people in large numbers for quite while now. The Middle East and parts of Africa are in flames thanks to violent Islamic movements. The thing that made Charlie's mass murder shocking was it's location - the center of Paris - by young French men with a Middle Eastern heritage. It brought into sharp focus the growth of a violent Islamic community in the center of Europe. Europe is under attack. It's people, it's culture and it's very existence as a Western enclave is in question.

In a way, Charlie Hebdo and its attackers have something in common. Neither one has much use for European culture. Like Barack Obama, they wish to fundamentally transform it. Muslims by immigration, non-assimilation, and the threat of violence. The Left - and make no mistake Charlie is firmly on the Left - through its dominance of the media and academia.

But just because both despise the existing culture does not mean that they are not at each others throats. They despise each other and are fighting for dominance. In Weimar Germany two Leftist movements - Communists and Nazis - battled in the streets and the beer halls for dominance. It was "Uncle Joe" Stalin who labelled the Nazis's "right wing," and the press has been parroting that lie ever since. The Nazi's were not calling themselves "National Socialists" with any sense of irony.

Which brings us to the question, should we chant "I am Charlie?" Should we applaud Charlie? Should we imitate Charlie? Is free speech an end in itself or the means to an end? Is free speech absolute? Should certain things be off limits, if not legally then morally? Let's agree that no one should be killed for being offensive. But a Muslim physician in Baltimore makes some good points about the way the media - supposedly the champion of free speech - doesn't practice what it preaches.

Different patients hurt at different places. Just because my sensitivity is my Prophet, does not mean yours has to be a divine figure as well. For Jews, Moses may be fair game, but mocking the Holocaust is not. For Christians, ridiculing Jesus causes varying levels of angst. For Blacks, the N-word is off-limits. And certain ridicule has left the LGBT community so terrified that it hurts all over.

It's largely our social — not legal — codes that bar us from poking at others' tender spots.

And when these codes are violated, we rush to amend. When PepsiCo released an ad for Mountain Dew in 2013 that was deemed racist and misogynist, it was axed. When Snickers launched a 2007 Super bowl ad showing two straight men accidentally kissing, it was considered to be homophobic and benched. When a Jewish-owned company created a billboard ad for a budget vodka, boasting "Christmas Quality, Hanukkah Pricing," it was quickly pulled.

Yet, no one thought it was the end of the First Amendment. Why then, can the American Muslims not ask for the end to hurtful material against Prophet Muhammad without getting a free speech lecture shoved down their throats?

If "nothing should be off limits," as American Muslims are reminded, then why do we mollify other groups? Why do we lionize free speech only when it ridicules Prophet Muhammad?

Unfortunately for him, his examples refute his conclusion. The press does not lionize free speech. The media do not practice free speech or we would not have any references to A Word That Must Not Be Uttered By A White Man That Begins With "N." His other examples also refute his point that Muslims are uniquely picked on in the press. But he does have a larger point, it's simply bad manners, immature, juvenile, stupid, ill bred and generally offensive to make fun of other people's sacred beliefs.

Charlie was not focused on ridiculing Muslims. They specialized on ridiculing everyone and everything that represented Western culture and did it in the crudest terms. They were an equal opportunity insult machine and Christianity was one of their favorite targets.

Become more like Charlie? No. Even if we sympathize and grieve for the victims of the terrorist attacks. Because the Left, the nihilists, the iconoclasts are a dead end, a soulless collective. The Communist dream mashed together with a "whatever floats your boat" ethical standard.

There are any number of reasons to oppose Islamic expansion and violence. In my opinion, Islam is a violent, oppressive political movement dressed up as a religion. Kwanzaa with a prophet. The attack on Charlie did not add or detract from that opinion. The attack was a wake-up call only to the simple-minded who believed that Islam really is a religion of peace. It may help the low-information crowd to understand that Islam is on the march and will kill you, even in Paris, unless you submit.

But the means to resist and roll Islam back are found in our religion, our culture, and our morality. If we become more like Charlie we disarm ourselves because Charlie believes in nothing more elevated than an accidental universe while followers of Islam believes in something greater. When it comes to a mortal struggle, people who believe in something greater than themselves have a big advantage over those who only believe in themselves. When George H.W. Bush was Vice President he attended a series of funerals of Soviet leaders. After Brezhnev funeral in 1982 he remarked "there was something missing. There was no mention of God. There was no hope, no joy, no life ever after .... So discouraging in a sense, so hopeless, so lonely in a way."It took a while, but those who believed in the Soviet "new man" were vanquished by those who believed in God.

People who are willing to kill themselves via suicide bombings believing that they will go to heaven with 72 virgins of their own are more motivated and infinitely more dangerous than people who believe that this brief life is all there is, so you have to "Go for the gusto" (drinking beer), or by publishing a magazine filled with bad cartoons mocking Christ or Mohammad.

If the West is successful again, as it once was before the Gates of Vienna, it will succeed for reasons that are the exact opposite of the kind of nihilism that motivates Charlie Hebdo. Be Breitbart , be courageous for truth.

Trey Gowdy on the role of the House of Representatives

About that "warmest year" hoax.

The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much.

As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond. Another analysis, from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, drawn from ten times as many measuring stations as GISS, concluded that if 2014 was a record year, it was by an even tinier amount.

Its report said: ‘Numerically, our best estimate for the global temperature of 2014 puts it slightly above (by 0.01C) that of the next warmest year (2010) but by much less than the margin of uncertainty.

And here's the kicker:

‘Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year… the Earth’s average temperature for the past decade has changed very little.’

The earth's average temperature has changed very little over the last decade. When skeptics say this they're compared to Holocaust Deniers.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Native Hawaiians Seek Independence

It may surpise people who have never been to Hawaii and think of it as nothing but a tourist paradise,, but the Islands are home to some very unhappy people. There are some very specific definitions of who is a "native" and who is not, and what it means in legal terms.

I was surprised to find that a lot of "native" Hawaiians don't want to be part of the US. In fact they are as dissatisfied with America as Al Sharpton or Barack Obama.

Don't be surprised if this feeling grows and results in political agitation and ends in violence.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam

How Islamofascists try to control the narrative. When you hear someone described as "Islamophobic" it probably started in the Honor Brigade.

It was the first time a fellow Muslim had pressed me to refrain from criticizing the way our faith was practiced. But in the past decade, such attempts at censorship have become more common. This is largely because of the rising power and influence of the “ghairat brigade,” an honor corps that tries to silence debate on extremist ideology in order to protect the image of Islam. It meets even sound critiques with hideous, disproportionate responses.

The campaign began, at least in its modern form, 10 years ago in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, when the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — a mini-United Nations comprising the world’s 56 countries with large Muslim populations, plus the Palestinian Authority — tasked then-Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu with combating Islamophobia and projecting the “true values of Islam.” During the past decade, a loose honor brigade has sprung up, in part funded and supported by the OIC through annual conferences, reports and communiques. It’s made up of politicians, diplomats, writers, academics, bloggers and activists.

In 2007, as part of this playbook, the OIC launched the Islamophobia Observatory, a watchdog group based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, with the goal of documenting slights against the faith. Its first report, released the following year, complained that the artists and publishers of controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were defiling “sacred symbols of Islam . . . in an insulting, offensive and contemptuous manner.” The honor brigade began calling out academics, writers and others, including former New York police commissioner Ray Kelly and administrators at a Catholic school in Britain that turned away a mother who wouldn’t remove her face veil.

“The OIC invented the anti-‘Islamophobia’ movement,” says Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a frequent target of the honor brigade. “These countries . . . think they own the Muslim community and all interpretations of Islam.”

Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

four years after the start of the Arab Spring, the new Middle East looks more and more like the old one—only worse.

SMART DIPLOMACY ALERT

From the Wall Street Journal

While U.S. airstrikes have put Islamic State forces on the defensive in Iraq, they haven’t had the same effect in Syria. Our story looks at why military action by the U.S. has not stopped Islamic State militants from expanding their control in Syria and considers the implications of this failure. We note that some administration officials have been pushing America to focus more attention on Syria, but powerful voices oppose any idea that would drag the U.S. military deeper into a country where few see options that will improve the situation. However, the “Iraq-first” strategy is likely to be questioned in the coming weeks when the new Republican-controlled Congress holds hearings on the president’s game plan in the Middle East. Meanwhile, we report that the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State is coming under growing criticism in Iraq, complicating the mission as Washington ramps up its forces in the country. And we look at the wider region, noting that four years after the start of the Arab Spring, the new Middle East looks more and more like the old one—only worse.

Before we deployed Barack Hussein Obama's SMART DIPLOMACY in the Middle East as the Arab Spring unfolded the area was controlled by a few long time dictators and Arab "royalty" who were content to not cause trouble. Today, after deaths counted in the hundreds of thousands, crazies are roaming the sands forests bringing back the 7th century and importing it into a Western world which though it left that all behind centuries ago.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Why I am a Conservative

Stacy McCain has a great essay on the horrors visited on people by "progressives" and Liberal philosophers.

What is remarkable is the extent to which French intellectuals have caused this endless tide of human misery.

“We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.”

— Edmund Burke, 1790

Burke’s insight into the fundamental error of the French Revolution — its inspiration by such philosophes as Rousseau and Voltaire — could be extended to every “progressive” movement ever since.

The modern Cult of Progress, the characteristic “presumption” of the intelligentsia in their belief in their own superiority, has repeatedly afflicted humanity with enthusiastic schemes for political, social and economic change. Always these innovations require us first to destroy “hitherto existing society” (to quote the Communist Manifesto), and to entrust our future to the control of elites. Always the result is the same. From the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the Bolshevik Terror in revolutionary Russia, from Kristallnacht in Germany to the “Great Leap Forward” in China to the “Killing Fields” in Cambodia, the path of “progress” is a trail painted in blood, littered with the corpses of those murdered or starved to death for the sake of political theories.

The French revolution was followed by the Terror, followed by Napoleon Bonaparte who plunged Europe into decades of war which left between 3 and 5 million people dead.

The "philosophers" who followed the French model managed to kill about 100 times more. Many in "peacetime." It's this thing about breaking a few eggs to make an omelet.

One of the most satisfying things about the French Revolution is the death of Robespierre.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Grubering Junior College

Kerry Daugherty wrote a fairly sensible column in the Virginian Pilot today. She made the point that Obama’s promise of “free” junior college was a deception. She said that “… he's [Obama’s] treating Americans as people who lack critical-thinking skills.” Because, of course, Junior college will not be free, just like primary schools are not free, roads are not free, garbage collection isn’t free and ObamaPhones are not free. But she pulled her punch. Perhaps because she wanted to get her column printed.

She should have said that we’re being “Grubered,” a verb that came into vogue following the now-infamous series of outbursts by MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber about how the Obama administration depended on the stupidity of the American people to pass ObamaCare.

You can be sure that the Gruber-aping editorial board of the Virginian Pilot was be in full throated support of “free” junior college and spend tons of ink condemning the knuckle-dragging, sister-marrying, anti-science Republicans for their war on education.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority

Roger Simon doesn't mince words. We are at war, whether we want to be or not. And we're losing. The leaders we have are ignoring it or desperate to change the subject. Obama did that yesterday, like a magician creating a distraction. while people were dying in Paris, his focus was on pandering to people who want free junior college.

Meanwhile, under the watch of the man who masquerades under the moniker of president of the United States, someone who can barely muster a dopey three-minute speech filled with banalities about the killings in France, radical Islam has metastasized across the world in a manner only dreamed of on 9/11. A map on Gretawire shows terror networks cutting a wide swathe across the planet, from South America through North Africa on to the Indian subcontinent and then into South-East Asia. In a sense the map should already include Western Europe, the way things are going.

And most likely things are going to get worse. Al Qaeda (operating with impunity in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere) and ISIS (with a state of its own the size of Indiana) are in a pissing contest for terrorist maniacs of the year while Boko Haram is doing its best to exterminate everyone in Nigeria, andapparently succeeding – all in the name of Allah. And our president never uses the word “Islamic” or acknowledges that we are at war — even though, quite obviously, the Islamists are at war with us and with Western civilization. And they seem just to be getting started. Only the morally narcissistic buffoons at the New York Times would think otherwise.

Which brings us to the 2016 presidential election. I have written before, “We need a wartime consigliere.” (Yes, yes, I know the consigliere isn’t the boss — but you get the reference.) We need a wartime president. Hillary Clinton, obviously, is as far from that as you could get, except for Barack Obama. So we have to look on the Republican side.

I’m not prepared to comment on any of the candidates now. I don’t know enough. But I will say this: In this time of war, I will be looking, far above all things, for the best possible commander-in-chief, man or woman. Put another way, how much does the person resemble Winston Churchill, the ultimate wartime leader, in my view? That’s not an easy thing. Churchill had a great verbal skill and certain unique charm that could inspire people. I can’t immediately think of anyone who has that. But Churchill was a figure of legend, someone even the oldest of us see from afar or on old news clips. In his day, we know he was reviled by many.

So maybe someone will emerge. We are in desperate need of that person after the last six, soon to be eight, years. What has been lost domestically is certainly significant, but pales in comparison to the global situation and the religious war that we are in. If America continues to lead from behind after 2016, it will cease to be America. The world will shortly be in chaos and we will all be back in the Middle Ages. Sound excessive? I wish it did.

So I implore those of you reading to put aside your special interests for the moment, or at least soft-pedal them. Most of them can wait and if we lose the war against Islamic terrorism, which, believe it or not, we are currently losing, they will all be irrelevant, the unread text of Obamacare buried in the sand like Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias. Civilizations have died before. Let’s not let it be ours. Let’s overcome the reactionary leaders in our own country and in Europe, who suffer from such extreme cognitive disorders that even after #CharlieHebdo they insist on delinking Islam from terrorism. Let’s find our Churchill — and now.

You no doubt remember Barack Obama's boast, what seems a generation ago back in 2007, that he had the capacity to unite Americans better than anyone else in that presidential competition.

"What the American people need and what the Oval Office needs right now is good judgment," Obama told the Washington Post.

Then, the freshman senator added, "I don't think there is anybody in this race who's able to bring new people into the process and break out of some of the ideological gridlock that we have as effectively as I can." It hurts too much now to laugh at those early Obama false claims.

Two female Marine officers who volunteered to attempt the Corps’ challenging Infantry Officer Course did not proceed beyond the first day of the course, a Marine Corps spokesperson confirms to the Free Beacon. The two were the only female officers attempting the course in the current cycle, which began Thursday in Quantico, Virginia.

With the two most recent drops, there have been 29 attempts by female officers to pass the course since women have been allowed to volunteer, with none making it to graduation. (At least one woman has attempted the course more than once.) Only three female officers have made it beyond the initial day of training, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test, or CET. Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.

More calumny from the Virginian Pilot

This morning's editorial refers to conservative radio show host Mark Levin as a "right wing shouter." Which is typical of the kind of vitriol we expect to read from the brain damaged editors of the Virginian Pilot.

Imposing Islamic Culture

Europe is being forced to confront the broader war within its own borders. Shortsighted immigration policies have left many European nations with large Muslim populations that are rapidly growing while the indigenous ethnic population is at or below replacement levels, and the newcomers are not assimilating to the existing cultures but rather attempting to impose their own culture on their hosts.

The political consequences are either submission of the original culture to Islam or ...

Anti-immigration parties are finding increased support across Europe, and although the European and American press like to describe them all as “right wing” some are merely urging reasonable restrictions on immigration and assimilation policies for those already in the country along with the same sort of economic agenda that conservatives offer in America, but there are parties with a more authoritarian style that will also make gains in countries where the more established parties refuse to offer viable solutions to the pressing problems posed by an increasingly radicalized Muslim population. Wherever any resistance to the Islamic immigration is considered beyond the respectable limits of discourse, the disreputable parties will become increasingly popular.

Students of history know that Hitler was = for many Germans - the preferred alternative to the economic and cultural chaos in Post WW1 Germany.

The gathering storm in the U.S.

The United States has a smaller, albeit growing, Muslim population, and it is not segregated and alienated to the same extent as In Europe. Nor are the parameters of the debate about Islam’s uneasy coexistence with the West so severely restricted, despite the best efforts of politicians and the academy and the establishment press and the entertainment industry. The death toll from radical Islam’s war against the West is nonetheless high here, and likely to grow higher, and the same willing blindness to the problem too often prevails at the highest levels of power. The anti-social ethos that Theodore Dalrymple describes in the ghettos outside Paris is eerily similar to what is found in the ghettos within America’s cities, right down to hip-hop music and fashion and government-subsidized bling, and the reaction by America’s intellectual elites to its anti-social and police-hating ethos is pretty much the same, and all that’s missing is radical Islam’s appeal to the spiritual void of those angry young men and its promise of something more meaningful. Post-modern Europe has nothing similar to offer, and America needs to recall the vision that once served that purpose.

The same apologetic and appeasing offer of debilitating support that America has offered its ghettos since launching a “War on Poverty” is what it now offers the Islamic world, but generous welfare systems and a condescending multi-culturalism are no more likely to work here than in France.

When you see the growing number of Black women wearing hijabs and Black men sporting bushy beards when neither one has ever set foot in the Middle East you know that they are rejecting Western culture and adopting an adversarial position to the native culture. There are many facets of the Ruling Class culture of which Middle America disapproves. We do not have to man the ramparts to defend Hollywood's culture or the anti-family, anti-Christian subcultures that have sprung up in America. But we have to be careful that in our battle over the culture we do not watch our backs only to find that Islam has become the greater threat. Unfortunately, the Ruling Class seems to know only one way of dealing with its enemies, to buy them off. And as Norman says, that isn't working in France and won't work here.

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, “Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.”

However, because the honor of the Prophet is something which all Muslims want to defend, many will take the law into their own hands, as we often see.

Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.

So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.

some people disapprove of USA Today's decision to print his op-ed. I'm glad they did. You'll not get this kind of honesty about Islam from the MSM who with one voice continue to insist that Islam means peace. Can they now please shut up with this lie, or is that too much to hope for?

The grisly Islamist terrorist assault that left 12 people dead at a French satirical magazine Wednesday came against a backdrop of mounting xenophobia and tension boiling over Western Europe, where traditionally secular societies are struggling to absorb surging Muslim immigrant populations ...

Mr. Landis said the attackers mostly likely sought to feed rising European fears of what some anti-Muslim groups have dubbed a rising “Eurabia.”

The rise of the term coincides with a wider question about whether nations like France have simply failed to successfully absorb such immigrants, either economically or culturally.

God bless the Washington Times but this bit of news analysis is incredibly wrong-headed stupid.

In the first place, that "surging Muslim population" does not wish to assimilate. There are portions of Paris where police dare not go and throughout Europe Muslims are importing their customs and enforcing them by killing those who disagree. Authorities in England turned a blind eye to Muslims gang-raping young girls in accord with Qur’anic allowance for the sexual enslavement of infidel women. Google "Muslim trouble in" and up will pop a list of countries including France, Germany, England, Sweden, Australia, even the US.

The governments in Europe, as well as cultural leaders in the US have worked to help Muslims enforce their cultural standards.

The murders in Paris are only the latest atrocities in a longstanding war against anyone making critical comments regarding anything Islamic, which began during Mohammad’s lifetime and has been especially troublesome since the fatwa was issued by the mullahs of Iran against Salman Rushdie in 1989. Since then the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh has been brutally murdered, the publishers of a Danish publication have gone in hiding, riots have raged through Egypt over a rarely seen YouTube video, and now 12 brave Frenchmen are dead. The response from the same western civilization that once protected free speech as a foremost value has thus far been acquiescent. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders was tried under his country’s restrictive “hate speech” laws for questioning the wisdom of unfettered immigration from Muslim countries, the masterful essayist Mark Steyn has found himself on trial before a Canadian “Human Rights Commission,” and Van Gogh’s courageously outspoken collaborator Aayan Hirsi Ali has been forced to leave the country for America and been banned from the graduation ceremonies of this country, where the maker of that rarely seen YouTube video was also sent to prison on questionable parole violations after the government officially condemned his views and falsely blamed him for the murder of four Americans at a consulate in Libya.

The Washington Times reporter, Guy Taylor, then goes on to label the concerns of native Europeans as "xenophobia." Referring to Europe as a secular society makes it appear that what's going on is Europe is similar to the dispute we have between people who want to put the baby Jesus on the courthouse lawn at Christmas and the ACLU. Blaming France for failing to absorb immigrants who are culturally and religiously the opposite of Frenchmen - and wish to stay that way - is the kind of thing that is altogether too typical of members of the media.

Third, the killers motives are pretty clear. They stated them as they killed the 12 people who died in the attack. They were avenging the honor of the prophet. Feeding fears of "Eurabia" may be the outcome but the idea that they were murdering people with the express purpose to heighten fears of the Islamization of Europe has it exactly backward. The attack was a warning not to oppose them, not to mock them and to defer to them.

It remains to be seen whose side the ruling class in these countries are on. And whose side will win.

Wednesday, January 07, 2015

NY Times "French massacred, Muslims worst hurt"

The sophisticated, military-style strike Wednesday on a French newspaper known for satirizing Islam is sure to accelerate the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe, feeding far-right nationalist parties like France’s National Front.

When French people get killed why do bad things always happen to Muslims?

The Liberal fat cats seem hell-bent on proving Muslims are right when they call Americans degenerate perverts.

Last spring, Epstein completed a 13-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor in Palm Beach. Now he was hosting a party for his close friend, Britain's Prince Andrew, fourth in line to the throne.

When a photo later surfaced of the two men walking in Central Park that weekend, the British press seized on the story, spinning out weeks of headlines about the 16-year relationship between Epstein and Andrew, with salacious details of underage "masseuses" and even a cozy weekend in Balmoral. ... But the uproar over "The Prince and The Perv"—as the British headlines screamed—mysteriously drowned in the Mid-Atlantic. New Yorkers barely batted an eye about the scandal-mongering across the pond. "A jail sentence doesn't matter anymore," says David Patrick Columbia, founder of New York Social Diary. "The only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty."

"In the Midwest, where I am from, he would be a social pariah," says Lorna Brett Howard, a political activist and wife of Irving Post Capital CEO and Aeropostale director John Howard. "What I see here is if you have big money or are famous then you get a pass."

Just so. Keep in mind that Hollywood still supports Roman Polanski even after he was convicted of raping a 13 year old girl.

The two police officers shot by a Bronx robber they were trying to arrest would have rather not gotten visited by Mayor de Blasio, family and fellow cops told The Post on Tuesday.

The father of the more seriously wounded of the pair, Officer Andrew Dossi, 30, said his son “wasn’t too happy about the mayor’s visit.”

“He deals with some crappy people every day and getting no support — come on,” Joe Dossi said, referring to the feud between the NYPD’s rank and file and de Blasio over unrestrained anti-cop protests and the mayor saying he had cautioned mixed-race son Dante to be wary of cops.

On the evening of December 2nd, 2010, a handful of America's media and entertainment elite—including TV anchors Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos, comedienne Chelsea Handler, and director Woody Allen—convened around the dinner table of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It wasn't just any dining room, but part of a sprawling nine-story townhouse that once housed an entire preparatory school. And it wasn't just any sex offender, but an enigmatic billionaire who had once flown the likes of former President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak around the world on his own Boeing 727. Last spring, Epstein completed a 13-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor in Palm Beach. Now he was hosting a party for his close friend, Britain's Prince Andrew, fourth in line to the throne.

Keep this in mind when you recall that Obama hung around with racist preachers, Leftist bombers, crooked politicians and slum lords.

Bob McDonnell just got two years for accepting a Rolex watch. He made the mistake of being a Republican.

The poll Mitchell wasn’t buying was an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier that day. The poll revealed that 51 percent of respondents felt that the interrogation practices used during the Bush era were acceptable. Only 28 percent said they went too far and were wrong.

But speaking to NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, Mitchell warned her audience against her own network’s polling, saying that polling is “always an imprecise measure because of the way questions are asked.”

Engel seemed to agree with Mitchell’s intimation that the poll could be wrong. He told Mitchell that those who answered the poll were just responding emotionally and that they might be proven morally wrong by “history.”

Then Mitchell seemed to announce her distrust of democracy itself, saying, “Should public opinion really be setting policy?”

Jounolists: politicians with bylines. Typical of the ruling class. Mitchell is the Jonathan Gruber of journalism.

Noah Rothman at Hot Air came across a BBC documentary about North Korea that described the repressive regime as not really communist and actually described the nation as ‘far right.’ That riled up some people on Twitter.

That "5% GDP Growth" number is misleading.

The MSM are gleefully reporting that the economy grew by 5% in the third quarter. This must be the economic boom that Obama has been promising since 2008?

Well, no.

It appears that most of the 5% growth last quarter was achieved by an increase in consumer spending on higher health insurance premiums. In other words, spending more on insurance premiums for ObamaCare is supposed to be good for the economy.

Does that make you feel richer already? No?

Well take a look at how Team Obama managed to create that 5% figure.

It seems that they "revised" (i.e.cooked the books) spending on health care services by taking it out of the 1st quarter and putting it back in later, in this case, the 3rd quarter.

Here's how they took it out:

Here's where they put it back in:

Here's a little secret: the government gets to revise the numbers for months and quarters in the past under the assumption that given more time they get more and better data. I found this out years ago when I hears a talk by a very smart - and witty - Wall Street analyst who made great fun of government economic statistics by quoting numerous revisions for GDP numbers for the same period. It was eye-opening, and I have never viewed government statistics in quite the same way.

Revising economic data as better information is gathered sounds plausible, but it also gives the government the opportunity for political mischief. Thanks to the "polar vortex" of early 2014 that slowed the economy, the government statisticians figured that the 1st quarter was so bad that they may as well use it as a "kitchen sink" quarter. Via Zero Hedge:

Back in June, when we were looking at the final Q1 GDP print, we discovered something very surprising: after the BEA had first reported that absent for Obamacare, Q1 GDP would have been negative in its first Q1 GDP report, subsequent GDP prints imploded as a result of what is now believed to be the polar vortex. But the real surprise was that the Obamacare boost was, in the final print, revised massively lower to actually reduce GDP! ... Because the brilliant propaganda minds at the Dept of Commerce figured out something banks also realized with the stub "kitchen sink" quarter in November 2008. Namely, since Q1 is a total loss in GDP terms, let's just remove Obamacare spending as a contributor to Q1 GDP and just shove it in [a later quarter].

.....

In short, two-thirds of the "boost" to final Q3 personal consumption came from, ... the same Obamacare which initially was supposed to boost Q1 GDP until the "polar vortex" crashed the number so badly, the BEA decided to pull it completely and leave this "growth dry powder" for another quarter. That quarter was Q3.

And that, my friends is how the MSM is now able to giddily report that the Obama economy is rolling in high gear.

Sunday, January 04, 2015

Want to influence a casino bid? Polish your corporate image? Not be labeled a racist?

Then you need to pay Al Sharpton.

For more than a decade, corporations have shelled out thousands of dollars in donations and consulting fees to Sharpton’s National Action Network. What they get in return is the reverend’s supposed sway in the black community or, more often, his silence.

Here's a list of companies that paid Sharpton off:

Sony

AEG

AT&T

Verizon

McDonald

Wal Mart

Macy

Pfizer

General Motors

Honda

Chrysler

Pepsi

How do you feel about doing business with companies that support this racist shake-down artist?

Richard Fernandez ponders the problems with Western culture that's incapable of creating a belief in justice.

In the Western legal model it is illegitimate to impose “collective punishment” and being unable to do so, nothing is done. There is a strict injunction against profiling Muslims and other groups precisely because group guilt is forbidden. And that is as it should be, if the taboo is to be maintained. Collective punishment is a very destructive and blunt model which arises from a lack of information and a conviction that discrimination is a hopeless task.

But the prohibition does not run the other way. There is no strong taboo among ISIS or al-Qaeda, for example, against punishing individual Jews for the collective guilt of Israeli existence. It is enough to kill a Jew, any Jew. It doesn’t matter who. Their model of punishment doesn’t require detailed information.

The key distinction between lawfare and warfare is that the former recognizes only individual guilt, while the latter consists of nothing but collective punishment. Warfare is an information-poor form of conflict. In World War 2 style conflicts all the necessary information was encapsulated in the uniform. The people in American uniforms shot the people wearing German uniforms. The moral state of individual wearer of the uniform mattered not a whit. Anyone wearing an German uniform was liable to be shot, burned, blown up, stabbed or run over by a tank operated by an individual with an American uniform and vice versa. It was collective punishment all the way.

A whole system had to be brought down. An entire state and perhaps even an entire way of life had to be terminated. Under these conditions, the only information required was ‘whose side are you on?’

Provided the soldiers obeyed the conventions of war, they might kill hundreds or thousand and acquire no individual guilt at all. Paul Tibbets may have been proximately responsible for piloting the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, but the act was America’s. The foremost hero of the underground resistance, Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas GC, MC & Bar, also known as the White Rabbit was “a surprise defence witness in the war crimes trial of Otto Skorzeny, particularly on the charge of Skorzeny’s use of American uniforms in infiltrating American lines. Yeo-Thomas testified that he and his operatives wore German uniforms behind enemy lines while working for the SOE.” As far as the White Rabbit was concerned, Skorzeny had no individual guilt even if Skorzeny had caused the death of hundreds in the course of his illustrious military career.

When hackers bring down companies or terrorists commit outrages and then obfuscate their identity, the Western moral code goes “tilt” because it cannot resolve the contradiction between having to punish somebody and not knowing the name of that someone to punish. Although we might guess the identities of the guilty parties — more or less — that’s not good enough to mete out only individual punishment. Without the names of individuals to punish the whole Western defense and legal mechanism grinds to a halt. Without information and the ability to punish individuals lawfare is nothing but a pitiful, helpless giant.

Terrorism uses obfuscation to defuse lawfare knowing that the West will not turn to the alternative form of warfare.

The danger of course is that a “pitiful, helpless giant” sooner or later loses the the legitimacy to govern. A sufficiently enraged public will demand something more than impotence. Collective punishment is what happens when individual justice is seen to fail. When lawfare collapses then warfare eventually ensues, a point which I made in the Three Conjectures. Maybe not immediately, but inevitably, with all the tragedy that implies.

At some point, people in a culture that does noting effective to protect its citizens against aggression will see a backlash. That's happening in Europe now, with the growth of political movements that oppose the unlimited immigration of Muslims who are violent and have no desire to assimilate.

Generations of Americans experienced actual trauma. Our greatest generation survived the Depression, then fought the worst war in humanity’s history, then built the United States into the most successful nation that has ever existed. They didn’t accomplish any of that by being crystal eggshells that would break at the slightest provocation, they didn’t demand society change to protect their tender feelings. They simply dealt with the hardships of their past and moved on. Even my great uncle, the Korea Marine, never expected us to tiptoe around him. He wouldn’t talk about his experience, but he didn’t order us not to.

So again, fuck your trauma. If your past bothers you that much, get help. I honestly hope you come to terms with it. I hope you manage to move forward. I won’t say anything meant to dredge up bad memories, and don’t think anyone should intentionally try to harm your feelings.

But nobody, nobody, should censor themselves to protect you from your pathological, and pathologically stupid, sensitivities.

Read the whole thing.

In the comments Joyce said:

Maybe I’m not paying attention, but I have never heard a trigger warning used in any other way. And today is the first time I have ever heard the term microagression – although the concept the term describes is certainly familiar to me.

One final word…you say “our universities” and go on to cite the goings-on at UCLA. I have worked on a university campus for 13 years and can assure you with 100% certainty that UCLA is an outlier and is most definitely not representative of what occurs on campuses elsewhere.

That's interesting because I have been reading a great deal about this subject on the Internet. The author replied:

You’re the second person who works at a University who’s told me they’ve never heard of these problems on campus. I’m encouraged by that, but these concepts (along with “white privilege”), seem to be most pervasive at colleges. Last month a Georgetown University student wrote an essay saying he’s not angry at the two young men who robbed him at gunpoint, because his white privilege means he deserved it (my interpretation).

So the question occurred to me: who is making a big deal about this? The MSM which publishes these kinds of articles? If so, what is the objective? To make this kinds of Liberal group think go mainstream? Or to make this kind of thing ridiculous? These are not mutually exclusive options. It's entirely possible that the people in the press believe that this new form of psychobabble is legitimate. But, not realizing how far removed they are from the mainstream, they end up making it - and its practitioners in academia - ridiculous. One can only hope.

Saturday, January 03, 2015

It’s a journalistic travesty that Rolling Stone’s discredited and disgraceful University of Virginia rape story ever made it into print.

What’s more shameful is how so many people actually hoped the gory – and phony – tale of the fraternity gang-rape was true.

It’s as if many activists and politicians wanted a freshman named Jackie to have been brutally assaulted in September 2012 by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi frat house. It’s as if they hoped she had gone through a three-hour ordeal that ended in her fleeing the house party in a blood-stained dress.

Because as horrific as all that would have been, it would have helped their agenda.

It would be convenient fodder for liberals crowing about the rape “epidemic” sweeping American universities, where, according to an oft-cited but thoroughly debunked academic study, “1-in-5” college women are sexually assaulted.

It would have bolstered their canard that colleges can’t properly deal with campus rapes, and are in need of “fixing” through expansive new federal legislation.

And it would have dovetailed nicely with the overall “war on women” theme Democrats will trot out between now and 2016, when Hillary Clinton, or possibly Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., runs for president.

But instead, the implosion of the ginned-up UVA rape tale – much like the yarn Hollywood it-girl Lena Dunham spun about being raped by a “moustached campus Republican” named Barry – only erodes public trust in the veracity of bona fide incidents of rape.

And the faculty and administration of UVA headed by President Teresa Sullivan are doubling down, demonizing men in general and making the hot-to-trot "ladies" on campus appear to be victims. It's almost like the Feminists of all sexes want to drive heterosexual men away.

A Denver newspaper columnist is arrested for stalking a story subject. In Cincinnati, a television reporter is arrested on charges of child molestation. A North Carolina newspaper reporter is arrested for harassing a local woman. A drunken Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member is arrested for wife beating. A Baltimore newspaper editor is arrested for threatening neighbors with a shotgun. In Florida, one TV reporter is arrested for DUI, while another is charged with carrying a gun into a high school. A Philadelphia news anchorwoman goes on a violent drunken rampage, assaulting a police officer. In England, a newspaper columnist is arrested for killing her elderly aunt.Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America's newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets."These people could snap at any minute," says James Treacher of the Treacher Institute for Journalist Studies. "We need to get them the help and medication they need before it's too late.

Don't believe me? Check the graph, it's science. You don't want to be a science denier do you?

Despite of the ever-growing and bloody toll of victims of media-related crimes, some observers counsel against jumping to conclusions. Among the defenders is University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds.

"I think it's unfair to single out journalists as thieves, or violent, or drunks, or child abusers," says Reynolds. "Sometimes they're all of the above."